Oracle has announced an open source product for the NoSQL space, the Oracle NoSQL Database. Unlike other popular products including Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, Voldermort and many others, Oracle has set a benchmark on the features that are truly necessary for highly available data systems.

Many products in the NoSQL space have told you that consistency is not needed, eventual consistency is good enough, that transactions are not performant enough to include as a feature. No standards exists, there is no common interface for communication, or key features that products aim to meet or better. With this product, features including transactions, replicated data and failover which are built in, are features other open source NoSQL products will need to match.

Oracle NoSQL Database is a key value store, supporting a major/minor key for …

It’s quite a week here! Craig Russell and I will be giving a talk about the NoSQL APIs for MySQL Cluster (mod_ndb, memcached, and ClusterJ) twice: first at Oracle Open World at 9:00 AM on Thursday morning, and then again at Silicon Valley Codecamp on Saturday afternoon. Tomas Ulin’s keynote address yesterday morning unveiled some of the goodness in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster 7.2 (like Batch Key Access, the great optimizer feature from the ill-fated MySQL 6.0 tree).

And last night I dropped by Dave Neilsen’s NoSQL Camp, where I saw Andy Twigg ask a very interesting question in a 5-minute lightning talk. Andy simply pointed out that with hard disk drives, random I/O is slow and capacity is cheap — so of course it makes sense to denormalize your data (for instance, into a document database like MongoDB). But on …

I'm excited to see the new features in MySQL 5.6.3. Replication enhancements such as parallel SQL threads, crash safe slave and binlog checksum have been desired for years. I really appreciate that MySQL development team has released 5.6.3 in timely manner.

In this blog entry, I'd like to pick up one of my most favorite performance enhancements in MySQL 5.6.3: "network performance improvements". This was reported by Mark Callaghan as bug#54790 over one year ago, and finally it's fixed (I assume it's mainly developed by Davi Arnaut at MySQL dev team) in 5.6.3. The root cause of this problem was that prior to 5.6.3, under high loads MySQL internally had to call fcntl() lots of times to change non-blocking sockets to blocking (with timeout and alarm) and vice versa. fcntl() is serialized on Linux, so it doesn't scale with many CPU cores. You may suffer from this …

Optimizer: new EXPLAIN for data-modifiers

One of the new features of MySQL 5.6.3 is EXPLAIN command for data-modifying statements.
As it's obvious from its name, it outputs QEP (query execution plan) for INSERT, REPLACE, UPDATE and DELETE like old good one does for SELECT:

example:

mysql> EXPLAIN UPDATE t1 SET b = 'b' WHERE a > 2;
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+------+---------+------+------+------------------------------+
| id | select_type | table | type  | possible_keys | key  | key_len | ref  | rows | Extra                        |
+----+-------------+-------+-------+---------------+------+---------+------+------+------------------------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | t1    | range | a,a_2         | a    | 16      | NULL |    2 | Using where; Using temporary | …

At Oracle Open World 2011 there has been a large number of MySQL presentations. You can download the slides of my two presentations at Explaining the MySQL Explain and Improving Performance with Better Indexes.

You can find additional supporting information for these presentations in the Effective MySQL: Optimizing SQL Statements book.

Running phpMyAdmin On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04

The phpMyAdmin package from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories comes with configuration files for Apache and Lighttpd, but not for nginx. This tutorial shows how you can use the Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04 phpMyAdmin package in an nginx vhost. Nginx is a HTTP server that uses much less resources than Apache and delivers pages a lot of faster, especially static files.

MySQL Explain

Better Indexes

At Oracle Open World 2011 I gave two presentations.

You can download updated versions of Explaining the MySQL Explain and Improving Performance with Better Indexes presentations.

Want to know more, check out our Effective MySQL: Optimizing SQL Statements book that goes into great detail …

Red Hat acquires Gluster. Adobe acquires PhoneGap. Oracle does Hadoop. And more.

# Red Hat agreed to acquire Gluster for approximately $136m in cash. Red Hat CTO Crian Steven explained why.

# Adobe announced its agreement to acquire Nitobi, creator of PhoneGap.

# Oracle unveiled its Oracle Big Data Appliance, including Apache Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL database.

# ODF 1.2 has been approved as an OASIS …

Today will be a busy day for MySQL @OOW.  The sessions today cover a wide range of MySQL users.

Sessions include:

• Advanced MySQL Replication 
• Getting to know the MySQL Enterprise Monitor
• MySQL Performance Tuning
• Introduction to InnoDB
• Getting the most out of MySQL on Windows
• MySQL for Beginners
• The MySQL Roadmap

Today also includes a MySQL WorkBench Hands on Lab and we then get to end the day with the MySQL Community Reception. 

The wealth of knowledge here from MySQL is outstanding.  We have even heard from attendees that are here only for …